“Saar's coded symbols are as ever-present as they are evolving.”
C aptivating with deep hues of red and unfurling feathers and belonging to the esteemed private collection of Corice Arman, Betye Saar’s Aunt Sally’s Mojo is a fantastical talismanic shrine belonging to the artist’s eponymous Mojo series, and represents a pivotal turning point after the first decade of the artist’s career. Executed in 1972, the same year of her infamous work The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, the complex assemblage of Aunt Sally’s Mojo presents an emblem of spirituality to address Black female power and resistance. Titled after a stereotypical mammy figure used during the Jim Crow era, the present work recalls Joseph Cornell’s intricate assemblage boxes, examples of which Saar viewed for the first time in 1967, profoundly influencing her artmaking. Corice Arman, along with her late husband, artist Arman, became strong supporters and collectors of work by African-American artists, such as Saar. Now a board member of the Museum for African Art in Washington D.C., Corice Arman continues to champion works such as Aunt Sally’s Mojo, which transforms both found and commercial objects alike, including key ritual symbols, such as the sun, moon, and eye, to impart the subject with an air of mysticism and further craft a spiritual narrative. “Saar’s assemblage works begun in the 1970s utilize the accumulative process inspired by the tradition of African sculpture incorporating a variety of both decorative and power elements from its surrounding community. As a result, Saar’s orchestration of materials and techniques transcend the formal qualities of iconographical or symbolic signifiers, and transform the environments in which they reside in–and the people whom they engage with–into parts of the work itself. The end result outlines the importance of how Saar’s historical assemblages, as precursors of her present work, investigate concepts of the ritual and community, inherited traditions, and how objects retain the memories and histories of their owners” (Camille Weiner in Art Basel Miami Beach, Betye Saar: Ritual, December 2016, n.p.)
